Sharp

It is at the reply “Everything is certain literature for you, Emma?

I just think that the moomin role is sweet, nothing more ", as one understands that dark things will happen in Helena Dahlgren's wonderful novel" Sharp ".

For the literary scholar Emma, ​​who fortunately received a residence scholarship on the farm in Norrbotten where her favorite author Beata Skarp worked until her mysterious death, literature is not just everything.

It's the only thing.

The thoughts are directed to AS Byatt's satirical hit novel "The Obsessed" from 1990, where two researchers find letters that reveal a secret love affair between two Victorian poets (Cristina Rosetti and Robert Browning in thin disguise).

Who Beata Skarp really is, I leave unsaid, but Dahlgren mixes a speculative tone, the thin margins of a contemporary woman's life with a superb sense of style when she makes the boundary between Beata Skarp and Emma Wijkman so porous that literature becomes an immersive everything.

The marten on a mug is just the banal beginning.

Real crimes

You can never get enough of Denise Mina, and her true-crime-podcast-listening protagonist Anna McDonald in "Real Crimes" (translated by Boel Unnerstad) is a Mina man: suddenly overthrown by life, desperately struggling to get back on her feet as darkness approaches.

Anna's past proves to be fatefully able to reveal the truth about a crime, while at best it slowly, in the manner of podcasts, unfolds as entertainment.

The demons of class society never sleep, and no one, or anyone, knows who Anna McDonald is.

Sunday road

Surely we remember the first crimes we encountered in the media?

The annual murdered summer girl in the evening newspapers' 70s, the endless rapes in Mitt Livs Novell, the last films of victims while they were still alive and smiling in countless true crime series.

But the grass does not always smell like a fall.

As in Peter Englund's successful premiere in the genre, "Söndagsvägen - The story of a murder", about 18-year-old Kickan Granell's death, where the grass between the houses in Hökarängen, south of Stockholm is a living detail.

It has been called a counter-book, a deal with the obsession of our time, and then, of evil imminent death, most often directed at women.

And yes, written in the form it fights.

Fiction and reality slide together in a frightening way.

What these three books have in common is that they avoid the worst violence in favor of a glance at the reader.

Do you understand now, do you feel now?